Steadfast CEO Robert Kelly says Nigel Fitzgerald was “very much in line” to take over his role when he retires, but the group’s COO has decided running a large publicly listed company is “not in his future”.

As insuranceNEWS.com.au has reported, Steadfast announced yesterday that Mr Fitzgerald will step down from July 1 to pursue a “personal business venture”.

He will remain in a senior advisory role until September 30, to assist with the transition, and on the board of some Steadfast subsidiaries.

Mr Kelly has previously spoken of his determination to recruit Mr Fitzgerald, and the former local AIG CEO was widely tipped to take over when Mr Kelly retires.

“Of course, if he had seen his future at Steadfast, he would have been very much in line to take my job,” Mr Kelly told insuranceNEWS.com.au. “But his obvious talent will go into a different something that I can’t tell you about just at the moment.”

Mr Kelly says his COO has made a “significant contribution” over the past two years. 

“He’s been a great, great help to moulding what we wanted to do in Steadfast. We’ve got some fantastic people that have come into the organisation. He’s done the restructuring and what we wanted to be done, and now he’s ready to do his own thing.”

Mr Kelly says Monday’s announcement was not the result of any disagreement.

“Someone said to me, ‘Did you guys have a fight?’ No, not at all. If he had wanted to stay in public life, we probably would have been the vehicle for him, but his future is not in public life.

“The onerous requirements of the CEO of an ASX 100 company are incredibly time-consuming, and a lot of that time-consuming business is not productive towards running an entrepreneurial business.

“So, for somebody who’s entrepreneurial and then all of a sudden sees the nuances of what you have to do to steward a top-100 company, you find a hell of a lot of your time is spent not actually making money for the company.”

Mr Kelly has committed to not retiring before the end of next year. He says there are four internal candidates who will “certainly have their hat in the ring” to replace him.

“We'll do a progressive review of those, and some externals, between now and whenever I’m out. There’s no way I’ll leave this place until somebody capable of doing a much better job than what I’ve done is here to carry on. And we’ve got some internal executives that could do that.”